4 HETEROPTERA OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA. 



only those which have a fairly reliable record of occurrence in 

 the territory mentioned. 



As my personal collecting has been done mainly in the 

 States of Indiana and Florida I have, throughout this work, 

 given especial attention to the local distribution of the species 

 occurring in those two states. Since the days of Thomas Say 

 very little has been written on the Heteroptera of Indiana ; in 

 fact nothing but a few published notes by myself ( 1895 ; 1896) 

 and the casual mention of a few records by Van Duzee and 

 others. Say (1831) published at New Harmony, Ind., a notable 

 paper entitled "Descriptions of New Species of Heteropterous 

 Hemiptera of North America," only a few copies of which are 

 now extant."' In this paper he described as new 135 species; 

 40 of these he mentioned specifically from Indiana and 14 

 from Florida. The others he mainly noted as "Inhabits United 

 States," which, I take it, would denote that they were of gen- 

 eral distribution throughout this country; or "Inhabits Mis- 

 souri," which, in 1831, comprised not only the territory of the 

 present State of Missouri, but that of the states northwest of it 

 between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. A 

 number of other species were described by Say in various scat- 

 tered papers. As his types were destroyed by fire, a few of his 

 species are at present unknown, others have been proven to be 

 synonyms, but the great majority of them are valid and com- 

 prise some of our best known and widely distributed forms. 



The distribution of Heteroptera in Florida is much bet- 

 ter known than that in Indiana. Mrs. A. T. Slosson, W. T. 

 Davis, Van Duzee, Drake, Hubbell and others have collected 

 them in many parts of the State. Van Duzee (1909) pub- 

 lished a paper on the results of his collecting, in which he 

 listed with full notes 168 species, 8 of which he described as 

 new. H. G. Barber ( 1914) compiled and published an annotated 

 list of all Hemiptera recorded or known from the State up to 

 that time. This included 372 species of Heteroptera, 8 of 

 which were new. Aside from my own collecting, it is from 

 the records of Van Duzee and Barber in the papers mentioned, 

 that most of my distributional notes on the Florida species 

 were derived. 



The literature pertaining to the Heteroptera of this coun- 

 try is more scattered and difficult to obtain than that of either 



■"This iiaper was afterward reprinted by l»r. Asa Fitch (1857) and also by Le- 

 conte i 1859) and the second reference after each of Say's species in this work is tr> 

 the Leconte edition, which is the one at present most available to students. 



